An Analysis Of Adjective-Noun Collocational Errors Committed By Chinese College English Learners

After the grammatical approach to English teaching has been the primary teaching methodology in college English classrooms for many years,the vocabulary learning now attracts more and more attention of researchers in the field of foreign language teaching and learning.Researchers and teachers found that collocation turns out to be quite difficult to learners' foreign language learning.There is no exception to Chinese college English learners.Generally speaking,the Chinese college students have had a large English vocabulary,but still commit a great number of collocational errors in their production of English.Therefore,it is good for the improvement of English teaching and learners' English proficiency to find out implications of this study to collocation learning strategies through analyzing and identifying the sources of collocational errors.There are quite a number of researches about classifications of collocation and the relationship between foreign language learners' collocational knowledge and their target language proficiency.But there are a few concerned with the analysis of collocational errors,especially of Chinese college English learners.What is more, there is a high frequency of adjective-noun collocation use in English production, which is one of the categories Chinese college English learners committed most.This qualitative study will focus on the study of adjective-noun collocational errors committed by Chinese college English learners.The research methods of contrastive analysis and error analysis will be employed in the study.The study is based on the Chinese Learner English Corpus,which is the largest learner corpus in China.Four sub-copora are employed in this paper,which use college students as subjects:ST3,ST4,ST5 and ST6.The adjective-noun collocational errors in the corpus are searched out with the concordance tool MyFinder,and then analyzed following procedures of error analysis.Three questions are answered:1) What are the features of the adjective-noun errors committed by Chinese college English learners? 2) What are the sources of the adjective-noun errors? 3) What possible implications for English vocabulary teaching and learning can be generated from the present study?All the errors collected are categorized and three most frequent adjective-noun collocational errors are identified;it is also found that the learners' competence in using different types of adjective-noun collocational errors does not necessarily develop along with their English proficiency.And sources of error are explored and explained from the aspects of Chinese interference,intralingual interference,and grammatical factor and so on.To conclude the pedagogical implications,the author suggests that English collocations learning should be improved through strengthening the awareness of teachers and learners,extensive reading of English articles,doing exercises of collocation practice,and using collocational dictionaries in their English learning process.Also,the limitations of the present study and suggestions for future study are discussed in the last part.